Podcast with Joe Lightfoot Transcript

Greetings, my friends and welcome back to the Lightfoot podcast. This week we have Malcolm Ocean joining us and he and I delve into all sorts of really, really interesting topics, largely focusing in on the Non Naive Trust Dance. So without further ado, I bring you Malcolm Ocean.

It is really exciting to be here with you. I've been looking forward to this conversation all the week and I would like to invite you to share any kind of song that is inside of your heart if there's one that is desired to be shared right now.

Yeahhh, beautiful. Ah, Fantastic.

Thanks

That really touched me on lots of different levels, Malcolm. I think we want to be a little bit insane as well as sane there right?

I think the issue is not so much with the sanity itself, but with our concept of what sanity is. Like, I think we do actually want to be completely sane, but we don't want to be the thing that we think of when we think the word sane. You get what I mean?

Yeah, definitely. Wow, that was beautiful. Thanks, man. That basically summed up everything that I want to explore with you today, which is beautiful.

Yeah. Well, I mean, we could just wrap it there.

That's it. Yeah, it was good to have you on the podcast. And take care, you know, good luck, good luck. We're weaving the same webs, it seems, my friend and that's really exciting. And so let's talk about it a bit. Let's compare notes and unpack the different ways that we're approaching this weaving of these communal bonds between different people around us, and also the different parts inside of ourselves. That's something I'm keen to unpack with you - parts. I've seen that you've been reading about internal family systems, and the song referenced that a few times and that's really alive for me today. But before going there, I've got a little quote here that I just read that's a definition of home and community, and I thought I'd share it with you and see how it sits. It says "A state of being completely known and loved, which empowers one to risk vulnerability and empathy. It is a space of safety and flourishing that one can venture from and return to." How does that sit for you? I know that you've just recently moved physical homes, right?

Yeah, totally. I've been thinking about home a lot in a in a few different contexts. I'm encountering limitations of the linear nature of thought, because it's like, "Oh, there's something I want to say about attachment theory here. There's something I want to say about modeling the concept of home on like a fractal level. There's something, you know, the stuff to say, obviously, about my personal situation of having just moved out to Vancouver Island from Ontario. And, yeah, um...

Joe Lightfoot 5:36

Why don't you start with—

Malcolm Ocean 5:39

I was like, "Can I speak on all these levels of abstraction at once?" That's what I sometimes try to do. So I came out to Vancouver Island with my partner, Sarah, in the last couple of months, and there is a sense of leaving home and seeking home, both, in that.

And one of the things that's become a sort of phrase that I say to people lately is, "I'm building a utopia, I need your help. The only rule is, we're not done till everyone says we're done." And that, to me, captures something about the essence of home. It's like home is a place where if something's not as you want it to be, then you get to change it.

Joe Lightfoot 6:50

Yeah.

Malcolm Ocean 6:52

But of course, like, okay, if you and me are sharing a home and something is how you want it to be, but it's not how I want it to be, then, well, is it home? And how is it home? And, you know, how do we make it our home as a multi person system if it's just the two of us sharing that space? And when I say home here, I could mean literally sharing a physical dwelling. But there's also a sense in which offices can feel like, like home, or they can feel like not home, right? Or a virtual context? [On] a Slack workspace? [In] Slack, the basic thing of allowing people to add their own custom emojis, I think, does a tremendous amount to make slack workspaces feel like home, because people can change them and create their own basic concepts of feelings and so on.

So yeah, there were ways in which Ontario wasn't feeling like home to me and my partner, and that ranged everything from, like, the amount of snow in the winter to dimensions of the social situation that we were in, in which, despite a lot of attention to dialogue and the capacity to figure out collective need meeting and so on, we were sort of reaching limits in terms of our pragmatic capacity to do that as a group. And so I think it's been really good for us to get space from there and for them, [and] for them to have the space that they have with us, with us having moved out. And we're still kind of looking at the question of like, "What does that conversation between them and us look like long term?" But then the thing is, like, we haven't properly settled out here, either. So we're definitely feeling very much in touch with this piece of, like, home and not home. Like here too, we're not currently in a place that we can properly settle. Like, we're staying in a spare room at my cousin's place. And there's certainly a sense of home to being with somebody who knows my grandmother, you know. But there's also, like, the space just isn't big enough to feel comfortably home. So yeah, lots of stuff like that.

Joe Lightfoot 9:20

Yeah, interesting. Could you give me a bit of a brief description of what a homey type Utopia might feel like for you there over in your new location? Like... would you click your fingers and jump into the kind of Smart Village that Mike and Euvie are trying to create or is it something a little different from that? Speak to me a little bit about that, if you would?

Malcolm Ocean 9:48

Totally. I mean, I think something like what they're trying to create but somewhere where there's not a meter of snow in the winter would be like a huge start, and I feel like from there [it] could iterate to anything else that felt important. Although, of course, a huge part of it is also the people. It's like wanting to be with people with whom there's a real sense of being able to do that iterative home creation thing. So it's like if there's a tension between two community members, can we reorient to "Okay, one community member is not able to feel at home while this is happening and another community member is not able to feel at home while this is not happening. So, you know, is there a way where both of them can be satisfied? And definitely like... there's a really strong sense in my system that compromise is basically never how you want to think about something, because it implies a sense of opposition, where... I mean, if you think about what the word compromise means in the context of computer security, right? It's like, you don't want your relationships to be compromised.

Joe Lightfoot 11:03

That's true.

Malcolm Ocean 11:04

Right? And, you know, the definition of compromise is, like, everybody's a little bit unsatisfied. Well, what that means is everybody's going to be slightly fighting the arrangement and that's not stable. So, yeah, you know, is there a way without a compromise to satisfy both people? Like maybe they just need to live further apart, so one of them can blast music and the other can have silence, you know, but they're still in the same larger village or something like that. Broadly speaking, I mean, one of the most important things for me really is just that quality of being with people where those conversations are happening on a really deep level, and, I guess, on all the levels. But, I mean, I do like this kind of solar punk aesthetic that you're pointing at. And I've felt into a few different varieties, and I don't have a particularly clear sense of what the physical logistics might look like. So, you know, there's a part of me that is really tempted to buy a whole island- I don't have the money for that myself, but I think I think the money could be found if the mission and purpose were clear, and the group were clear. So part of me wants to have a whole island that can just be 'trying to do a game B thing' and have a kinda -obviously not self sustaining economy in the sense of like being able to make its own smartphones, like obviously not. Or [obviously not] even [economy in the sense of] "make all of its own food." But to even be able to explore what it looks like to have a semi permeable economy in that sense, that has a kind of autonomy, feels feels pretty cool. But there's obviously a lot of drawbacks to islands as well, which is part of why they're cheaper than apartments in Vancouver, sometimes... or cheaper than houses in Vegas, not cheaper than apartments. But yeah.

When I think about inhabiting like a ecovillage island with fellow game B oriented individuals, I get a mixture of feelings in my body. One part of me is thrilled and delighted. And the other part of me is scared shitless of the concept of most of us not being ready yet for that kind of intimacy, I feel, and thus falling flat on our face. And so a lot of my work at the moment is "How do we create contexts to practice and up our skill levels and being able to sync up so closely?" And I get the feeling that's something you've been working on, personally, in a group context for a while. And it seems to have led you in this direction of what you wrote about as the 'Non Naive Trust Dance', which is a wonderful blog post you just shared recently - telling the story of how you arrived there. And I wonder if that's something you'd be happy to talk about a bit more and share with us?

Malcolm Ocean 14:04

Yeah, it's an interesting topic, and one that has so much surface area that I don't actually know if I have a default place to start in terms of diving into it. But we'll see where we can explore together, maybe. I guess, first thing to say is something like "There's a sense in which all trust is not naive and the thing that could be called 'Naive Trust' might be better called faith." Like, it[faith] is not, actually [naive], but part of what's confusing about that is that at a young age, people have their own sense of trust deeply undermined by their parents, by school authority figures and all sorts of other things like that. And so there's a process of basically coming to reclaim your own sense of "This is what I actually think, this is what I actually know, this is what I actually feel, this is what I actually want," and being able to really own all those things. And when you own all those things, part of what you notice is various concerns arising. And most people aren't very good at turning their concerns into something constructive or useful. And that's a skill that can be learned, but it's also important, on the flip side, to learn the skill of usefully relating to anybody's concerns, even if they're coming out in a way that's, in some sense, really hard to hear. And so backing up a little bit, there's a puzzle and the puzzle is... it's almost kind of a colon. Say, we've got a decision to make, how do we make the decision? How do we decide how we're going to make the decision? Who gets to decide how we're going to make this decision?

[Inaudible 15:59]

Right, right. And so, there's all sorts of things like that, that end up being pretty substantial influences on this. And of course, how the decisions actually get made is not necessarily the same as how people assert that the decisions get made. And that's part of where the undermine of trust comes in, where you're sort of like, "Okay, this is supposedly egalitarian, and everybody gets a voice," but in practice is actually favoring of a lot of people's voices, you know. Or, by contrast, you know, this person is supposedly in charge but it seems like somebody else is actually running the show, and it's easy for it not to feel safe to say that

Joe Lightfoot 16:38

Yeah, let me jump in here for a second. You keep bringing some stuff up for me that I think will be really relevant to this... trust - I often refer to these community collective models that have been writing about as trust networks, that's really what they are, first and foremost. And yeah, it does beg the question of "What is trust?" "Where does it come from?" And "How do we establish it?" And it seems that we've got these structures in the society we have now, where they're very hierarchical [and] really limit the amount of trust that you need. That seems to be where we've been heading with our systems and our structures. And, you know, you can see why that's happened, that [it] allows for large scale societal models to unfold. But I feel we're at a point where that's not really sustainable anymore; we kind of need to turn inward, the pendulum needs to stop going that way. And we need to start rediscovering trust with each other. But you lose a bit of a competitive advantage when you do that, and I feel our whole meta tribe is really in this interesting space of, "We're taking these first steps towards this new way of being," but that can dull the edge of how you compete in this kind of, you know, 'lacking in trust' economy that we have right now. And so it's a bold step we need to make until that's actually benefiting us, and I feel that we need to kind of create these little pockets and practice this trusting with each other. But something that you wrote about, that I want to put to you here is, you talk about welcoming in the distrust that might occur and these little cultural petri dishes were cultivating. And that really interested me, and I wanted to hear your thoughts a bit, around, "What does it mean to welcome in distrust?"

Yeah, well, as a matter of fact, I was just about to do it to you. So it's like, if you heard, for instance, that I was starting something, whether that's an island of people doing game B culture experiments, or whether that's an organization that's going to be trying to make some product that competes with Game A organizations, you know. Twice on this call, in relation to sort of implicitly both of those prospects, even though I haven't proposed to you that you join them, per se, you've expressed a feeling of, "Oh, when I hear that idea, part of me thinks there might be something naive about that."

Hmm.

Do you see what I'm saying? Like your response included a kind of, "Oh, there's some concern I have."

That's right.

So the question is, like, what do we do with that concern? And can we simultaneously hold on to the common grounds that we have, you know, which might be for instance, your excitement at the image of the island or whatever, while also holding on to you having a sense of like, "I don't know if we're ready. I mean, I don't know if the people I know are ready, like do you know people who are ready? And would I trust you if you said you did?" Like if you said "Hey, I think I know a bunch of people who are ready to do Game B on an island," would I just think you were kind of like deceiving yourself and actually pretty naive about the thing? I think it'd be pretty reasonable for you to think I was naive if I said that I thought I had a bunch of people who were just ready to do the thing.

Yeah.

And so there's this funny thing where -and I've noticed this more and more as I get into conversations, like the ones I imagine you have with many people on your podcast- one of the things I've noticed is that everybody's been burned in different ways and so their next project is mostly aimed at preventing that from happening again. And, sometimes, this is like a real big explosion burn. Other times, it's just more like, "Oh, I tried to do a thing in the corporate world and there was just a limitation; we could we could only get so far because we ran up against the, 'Well, the company's got to make money, and we can't do this social thing.'" And so then you encounter that kind of limitation, so you're [like], "Oh, I'll strike out on my own. I'll do my own thing." But then, other people have encountered the limits of "Oh, we were just going meta all the time - we never got anything done." And meanwhile, in other groups, it's like, "Oh, we kept just barging ahead and doing things that didn't make sense, because we couldn't stop to have conversations." So there's all these different ways that people compensate for how things have failed in the past, and in bringing any group together, you can find a group of people who've all been burned in similar ways and start a new thing, where you're all like, "Yeah, we're not going to do it in that way that we all messed up before." But then that group is probably going to be naive to some of the very things that have burned other groups. So the question is, if you can get a bunch of people who all have their own different experiences of something not working and then you can actually synthesize the collective sense of like, "Well, we can't do it that way because it'll fail like it did for Bob, and we can't do it that way because it'll fail like we did for Kathleen," and, you know, for a dozen other people, can you find a thing that actually feels non naive to everybody?

Mm hm. That's the question.

That's the question, exactly, and there's no single one answer to it. But the question is just literally, "Can you even iterate iteratively design such a thing?" Can you hold space for people's distrust? Even when it seems like it threatens the very thing that you find so sacred and important? You know, it's like, "Oh, but I know I need this thing because I didn't have it before and I felt so not at home, I need this thing," and somebody else is saying, "We can't have this thing." It's like, well, "But what are they really saying?" You know, is there a way to satisfy both?

Yeah, hmm. I tend to... at the risk of gathering together a very hard-boiled, cynical, bunch of people, I lean towards wanting to co create with people that have been deeply burned in community contexts. Because I look at it like... I mean, it's like, I would rather have a life partner that had been through a couple of really intense breakups just because that knowledge is priceless and impossible to gain in other ways. But yeah, it's interesting you reflect that, thank you. I bring it up for the reason that I recognize, like quite a -and I'm not totally at peace with this- [an] almost dark sense of cynicism that has arisen in me since I've been doing such intensive community work over the last seven years. Like becoming an amateur psychologist and psychotherapist for myself and others in that process. I've just drunk in deeply from the well of human trauma and my own my own trauma. And I've seen myself act in ways, because of the mirror of the community, that I'm really not proud of, [and] that I might have just avoided if I was following a kind of standard hyper-alienated, individuated, western life path. So yeah, like, you know, I guess I can look at someone and see quite quickly if they've got that look in their eye of "Yeah, we're human and it's heavy," mixed with, "And there's infinite potential to dance in new ways."

Exactly. Yeah. And that's the thing. It's like, in my experience, when people have any kind of cynical energy... you know, the thing I said earlier, that[sic] people aren't usually very good at articulating the things that are not working for them in ways that feel good to hear and are easily generative?

Yeah.

It's like, take complaining, for instance. It's broadly considered among, even pretty mainstream circles, that complaining is not good - don't do it. You know, there's this big movement of like, 'a complaint free world' and so on. And they're really onto something because you can't build things out of complaints directly - they're really, really awful as building blocks. But underneath every complaint is something sacred that has been violated, and if you can get in touch with that then it's like, "Okay, there's something really important that needs honoring there." And so, if you can recognize that under every cynicism is a passion to avoid being duped. And you can say, "Well, yeah, I really don't want to be duped." And I want to feel excited. Can I have both of those? Yeah. This this constant, "both-and"ing basically,

Yeah, I had a French partner for six years and I lived there for a while. And I noticed just how deeply a lot of French people bond over complaining together. It's like a sacred national pastime of a really deep connection straightaway, you know. And it is part of their reforming culture, they don't they don't put up with bullshit too much. They kind of [inaudible 25:46] streets and it's like, "Yeah, there's something to that there's a balance to be had there." Pivoting back to this distrust thing, I want to stay on it for a minute, because it's really interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

So, where I keep arriving at is that we need to try and sync up in groups with people that are at the same pace and readiness for that kind of dancing together. I guess that's it, in a nutshell - it's what I've learned. Because if to sit in distrust with someone is edgy and difficult, and it requires both people to recognize their their shadows and be willing to do that. But if not, [if] both people [aren't] signed up for that on the same level, then it can actually be kind of a harmful experience in some ways. So I'm in this interesting process right now of kind of wanting to be real and open up and do all that. But it's not really fair to some people that aren't doing that right now, and I'm having to kind of come to peace with that. I'm yearning to be to explore what trust and distrust is, you know. I almost want to break relationships to rebuild them, but it's quite intensive. And I guess I'm in a process of creating [Inaudible (27:03)]

I mean, if you set out to do that on purpose it doesn't work very well.

No, definitely. And, yeah, I want consent. I want to be in this group. I want to be on this island where we're doing that together. And yeah, I don't know. When you lose trust in someone, I find it's, it's a really tricky thing because you've got a kind of... what do you do with that? Like, yeah, talk to me about that.

Yeah, yeah. So a couple things I'll say there. One is that there's a thing that I'm still working out in my own thinking -like, I haven't gotten this totally clear- which is simultaneously that the word "distrust" seems to be useful for something, but, also, there's a different sense in which there's no such thing as distrust, there is only trust. And, you know, if you screw me over, it's not that I don't trust you anymore, it's that I trust you to screw me over.

Hmm.

Having said that, there is something about, like... say you've got this kind of classic relationship dynamic where somebody is projecting their father onto their partner or whatever, right? One way to describe what's happening there, or they're projecting their past, abusive ex on to the partner, whatever. One way to describe what's happening there is that in the person who's doing this "projecting" their system is saying, "I can't at present, tell the difference between you and someone who would hurt me." You may be different, but I can't see it and you need to do something, or we need to have a different kind of conversation in order for me to be able to relax into a sense of like, "Oh, yeah, I know that this is functionally different from that situation that hurt me." And this is very confusing, because if you are you with your partner and they are sending you an unconscious message that says, "I can't tell that you're not my ex." Again, a lot of this stuff happens in the frames, it's not really in the words. Like if it happens in the words, it becomes really obvious to both people usually, but when it's just implicit, it's like they're sending you a message saying, "I can't tell that you're not you know, this person who hurt me in the past," and you're like, "I'm definitely not." You can just tell that they are confused about something in how they're projecting on you. You can tell that they think you're someone that you're not. And, you know, of course you're not their ex, of course you're not their dad, you're not their mom or whatever.

Hopefully

Well, right I mean, in some sense, you know that. So, It can be really hard to just even acknowledge and create space for "This person in some sense genuinely can't tell. And I might trust myself not to do this really horrible thing, but they genuinely can't tell based on their past experience." And sometimes, what I've experienced is some of the most basic things that show up when people are not 'naive trust dancing,' are things where it's like, "I can't believe you would have to ask that." And it turns out, if you get over your "I can't believe you'd have to ask that" and you actually answer the question, it can actually be really fruitful. But so many people get so disturbed by the idea that somebody else would need to ask a question like, "So, are you saying that if I don't agree with you, I'm a bad person?"

Yeah.

And you're just like, "Well, of course, I'm not saying that," and that can be a kind of indignation. But if you can set aside the indignation, and just look him in the eye and say, "I'm not saying that,"

Yeah,

And just really mean it. Now, they might not immediately trust that, and that's part of what you got to navigate - people don't always know exactly what they need. But even literally being able to just take their questions seriously is surprisingly, valuable and necessary. And very often we become shocked that somebody could not know, such a basic thing that we ourselves know. So there's something about a kind of humility of like, the different knowings that people have based on their past experiences. And that's both personal with this projection thing, but it's also in relation to the thing I was describing before of like, "If we were to describe a hypothetical community, you're going to have certain fears that I'm not going to be worried about at all." Now, I might be naive, I might be not worried, I might just not have seen how shit can hit the fan in a particular way, whereas you have. Or, I might actually have a reason for knowing that that dynamic is not going to recapitulate itself. Or it could be an even messier tangle where, actually, with you in the group, you will pull the dynamic into recapitulating itself because of your very fear of it recapitulating, and that whole crazy psychological tangle. And those are really hard to talk about.

Yeah, so that's an area I want to touch on. As you're sharing this with me, there's a taboo here isn't there? And I'm always interested in that there seems to be a taboo around saying to someone, or having them say to you, "I don't feel I can trust you in this moment." It's like... I guess, because it goes back to our kinda tribal psychology of trust is everything - it's literally survival. So if you don't have it... so it's hard to talk about, and it's hard to be questioned on that, even if that question is deserved, and I guess practicing that is, is a little useful, right?

Yeah, so what I would say is, back in the tribal context, like pre-Game A, you would have an actual just basic trust in everybody that is not 100% deep, but is sort of just completely adequate, in some sense because there's a pretty narrow range of behaviors that people are going to do, and a narrow range of meanings and all that kind of thing. And I really don't want to like, paint it out as if that was all hunky dory, because I think there's actually lots of things that we don't understand about ways in which pre-Game A societies still had a lot of issues.

Sure

But the thing that they didn't have, which shows up in Game A, is a kind of gaslighting that says, "You should trust me more than you do."

Hmm.

And that's the thing that... exactly, like you pointing at this taboo, I think it's both socially taboo in a kind of general sense. And it's also... it's also... well, I mean, it's the thing I said before, about, like, "If I trust myself in a particular way, it can be disturbing if somebody else doesn't trust me in that same way."

Hmm.

Even though these are just two completely different facts, right? Like if we take something very basic, like I might trust that if I do a handstand I'm not going to hurt myself, [and] somebody else might not trust that about me. But that's not personal, right? If you take a basic example, you can see how this is like, obviously, these are just two different things. But even with something like a basic physical skill, I myself have gotten very disturbed when somebody doesn't trust that I can do a physical thing without hurting myself. I'm like, "No, I can." It's like, "Whoa! Hang on, what's getting threatened there, right?" And so I think this is one of... this very taboo that you're pointing at is exactly the thing that the Non Naive Trust Dance, as I've formulated it, is intended to completely flip on its head. It says the most important thing to be able to say in a relationship is, "I don't trust you."

Mm hmm.

And it's also really important to have that not be a big deal, because the reality is we don't trust each other... in so many ways.

Yeah.

And this is, again, where -and we could get into some some funny routes here with like, Alfred Korzybski, and E prime- the map is not the territory and so forth. And...

What's coming to mind for me right now, is this beautiful Russian proverb of, you've probably heard it, "Trust, then verify." I really... I like that folk wisdom.

Yeah, yeah, this is related but it's sort of different. It's like... I mean, what I would say is, "Trust as much as you actually do trust." So it's like, based on what I know about you, I trust that there's certain topics that we can talk about, and I would feel comfortable talking about those, which I wouldn't have with just like, if I saw you on the street, but didn't know who you were, like, had no context on you. I wouldn't assume we could like talk about various things. And so yeah, there's a verification process. But there's certain things I don't necessarily feel like we comfortably go into. I mean, you and I were doing some pretty good banter in the the messenger thread before this, this call, which, you know, definitely, like, adds to my feeling of ease around there. But I guess what I would say, maybe, instead of "Trust, but verify", is something like "Bet what you can bet on the trust that you have, and if that returns deeper trust, great. When it returns distrust, well, integrate it, have the conversations you need to have to find out what misunderstanding occurred to generate that." Yeah, and really important to note here is that[sic] with anything like this, some people hearing what I'm saying -could be you, I'm doubting this is true for you, but could be you- if a thousand people were listening to this, some people probably have been burned by situations when people insisted that there be conversations about everything, and then manipulated and steered those conversations. And so the idea of like, "Oh, well, if there's distrust, like, reconcile it," is like, "Also, if you don't trust the reconciliation process, honor that." You don't have to step into a reconciliation process that you don't trust. The most important thing is, if something doesn't feel safe to you, listen to that voice, [do] whatever you need to do. And, often, in practice with people who are exploring this stuff, it is actually going to just be safe to say, "Hey, something doesn't feel safe to me here." And it's so important -and this is where I was getting with the Korzybski thing- it's so important to note that "doesn't feel safe," does not mean "is not safe," [and] does not even mean "feels unsafe," If you see what I mean. Like "not feeling safe", or "not feeling trust " is different than "feeling distrust" or "feeling unsafety." It's like an absence, it's like, being able to say I would need something else in order to know that you're not fucking with me right now. Like you might not be, but I actually just can't tell - I don't have the data I need. And, you know, I think I'm not at all confident that my current formal explication of any of this is robust, in terms of having conversations with, like, literal sociopaths who have no empathy and various other like, deeply different things. But I do trust my gut to let me know if this process does not seem to be working in some consistently fucky way. And yeah so if I were to try it with somebody who, whether for sociopathic or just deep trauma reasons, was not able to kind of meet me in this and not able to do that trust building processes, I would notice and I would take a step back, basically. But then there's also the sense in which somebody else who hasn't been burned as much as I have, or in the ways that I have, might not know that, and they might try the thing and get burned and then they would have a new experience that they need, right? Like, that's the thing, we need to get burned in order to get that non naivette, and it's like a lot of the burdens are still unnecessary because they arise out of being unable to bring our mutual cynicism or our mutual complaints or our mutual mistrusts into dialogue together to generate something that satisfies both of us.

Yeah, and what you share, that last piece? That's what I'm holding on to at the moment, because right alongside this issue of rebuilding trust is forgiveness. And I've been rewatching the first season of True Detective lately, have you seen the show before?

No.

It's some from 2014, or something. It's my equal favorite piece of television ever made; the direction in it, for me, is just just extraordinary. And it's really deep; the writer, Nic Pizzolatto, based it on a book by Thomas Ligotti called... it's got quite a heavy title- "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror." And it's this kind of deep, brooding existential, anti-natal philosophical argument for the meaninglessness of things. But it's done in a way that's very refreshing, I don't know, it's kind of freeing literature in a way.

And then they made a TV series out of it?

Yeah, it's like a hard boiled detective series, and the main character, Matthew McConaughey plays him, is called Rust Cohle. And I think it's the best acting, scriptwriting, directing. For me, it's a work of art, [even though] it's quite dark at times. Rust Cole is a pessimist and he has so many good quotes, and one of them is that "People never forgive, they just have bad memories." And that, for me, links in with what we're talking about here - that maybe the naivety aspect, that I feel, is a part of trust. Because I feel like every time I'm trusting, I'm jumping a little bit into the unknown and there's an element of elective forgetfulness that, perhaps, I need to employ in those relationships that I have been burned in different ways. And I'm coming to the point that that's okay, because on the other side of that there seems to be a way that -with the right dialogue and the right discussion- you can resonate again, you can heal, you can forgive. And that's a beautiful thing but it comes back to what I was speaking about earlier, that it just takes both people to be somewhat practiced and ready to do that. So I'm hopeful and optimistic, and I like the energy of what you write about. And I feel excitement reading about this idea, because it speaks to me of like, "Hey, trust isn't something to be so afraid of. If it's lost it can be rebuilt, it can be danced with in a way that's generative, and there is a way to move past what you're holding on to. So, I'm not super off the Rust Cohle philosophy, but he definitely sways me in the moment, because he's very charming.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, forgiveness is a huge topic and I would locate it under the larger topic of like reconciliation, basically. And reconciliation, I guess, being a word for rebuilding trust or finding common ground from like... so there's the experience of finding common ground when you first meet somebody, right? You know, you're vibing and you're like, "Oh, yeah, okay, we got this in common and we got this shared reference and this shared style and whatever." But then there's the experience of finding common ground after you have lost some trust or lost some experience of same sightedness or sense of safety together. And that's a whole different process, right? And being able to hear each other's complaints without immediately capitulating and saying, "Oh, I did something wrong," is like a huge part of that. One of the other things I've been playing with and, you know, I really want to underscore, both for you and for anybody listening, is[sic] like, all of these ideas, I've thought about them a lot and they're big and complex, and they're on the edge of my thinking. So, you're very much getting me live outputting my thoughts on this, not a coherent presentation of any kind. And, yeah, but... [murmurs] what was I gonna say...

I don't even know if this is what I was gonna say, but it's relevant enough and it fits a slot. So, there's a thing where, you know, when people ask each other when... when one person says to another, "Hey, you did a thing that hurt me," it's very easy to feel like your only responses in that moment are to say, "Oh, shit. I'm so sorry, I won't do it again," or "I'll try really hard not to do it again." Or, alternatively, you might say, "No, I didn't." You might say, either, "You're not actually hurting the way you think you were" or, "Like, I didn't actually do the thing you think I did," or, "Yes, I did the thing, but you shouldn't feel hurt about it because of reasons X, Y, Z". Or you might say, "Look, yeah, you got hurt, but I couldn't do anything other than what I did, given what you did." Or you might say something like... I mean, there's various other soft, more subtle ways of deflecting, like saying something like, "Whoa, why are you blaming me?" Right? Which, on its own, is like, well, yeah, maybe the person's engaging in blame as a structure. But if you don't actually address that, like separate from the blame element of what they're saying -they're trying to tell you about, about something that's not working- so if you don't actually address that, structurally, then that will also produce a sense of their concern of not feeling heard. It turns out, I think, in most cases, except for anything really simple, in most cases, the thing that is actually most mature to say in that situation is, "I hear that I hurt you. I don't fully understand why my behavior hurt you in the way that I did." Although maybe I mostly understand that, like, often that part's pretty clear. "But then, I also don't understand why I did what I did. Like, I actually genuinely don't know what generated that behavior in me. And until I understand it, I'm probably going to keep doing this thing. So I want to learn to do something different, but I actually don't know what that's going to take. And in the meantime, how do we design our interactions to minimize that damage? Or is this a kind of thing that's an issue but is not like a big issue, and you're willing to sort of be with me in my learning process through that?" We have no idea how to say that, like, that's the whole level under the taboo, you pointed out of being able to say, "I don't trust you."

Yeah.

Right. It's being able to say, "Yeah, I hurt you [and] I want to do something different, [but] I don't yet know how," you know? And part of what makes this tough is that often, from the perspective of the person who was hurt, it feels really obvious. It's like, "Look, just don't do the thing - the thing that you do that hurts me, just don't do it." But, again, if you don't actually know what generated that behavior, that's like saying, you know, "Hey, companies stop polluting."

Right.

That's not gonna work, you need to understand what situational factors are driving the companies to do that polluting. You can try to make a law about it, but if you try to make a law about it, they'll lobby against the law, they'll forge documents, they'll bribe people, they'll do all sorts of things to get around that law if you don't understand what's generating that as a need in the first place.

Yeah. Have you got some kind of anecdote or story, personal or other, that touches on some of these elements we've been discussing within the Non Naive Trust Dance?

Yeah, let me feel into it. So some of its like personal and inevitably involves people other than me, so I'm trying to like sort of scan my brain for like "what's a good story to tell without without checking in with somebody else first?"

[Pause]

Well, I think this one will make a good segue into some other stuff so I'll go with that.

Okay.

So... hang on, I got something in my throat

There's a distrust lodged in there maybe

Okay, so... nope, still something there, hang on. I assume we can edit this out if need be.

Sure. I generally like to share the organic uncut rawness of the experience.

I mean, I'm fine to do that too. I do actually think that sometimes things do get caught in my throat in ways that are partially psychological and that's itself Interesting.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.

What if I tried to relax relaxing my throat instead of like coughing or whatever stuck in?

Yeah. [Pause]. I'm really curious now with the potential stories.

Well, I don't know. Maybe I'll just try speaking and my voice will be scratchy for the next few minutes. Oh, so yeah, last summer, a friend of mine and I -my friend's name is George- we were... so I run this this business called Complice, which is kind of a piece of software that helps people stay in touch with what's meaningful to them on a day to day basis and be more intentional, that kind of thing. It sort of looks like a to-do list, but it's very different in structure. And anyway, George has been a friend of mine for a few years and a user of Complice for a few years as well, and last summer, we thought, "Hey, it would be really cool," for him to actually do some work on the on the Complice app in some way. And there were already subtle experiences of distrust that we were dealing with even coming into that collaboration, because I had had a past collaboration, where it sort of felt like it fell apart and I didn't know why. And so, I was bringing in a fear that that would happen again, right? And, you know, these are all the kinds of fears that we bring in. But, what we did is we actually- this was last summer, when I was first starting to develop this concept of the 'Non Naive Trust Dance', and we intentionally framed the whole thing, like the whole collaboration within that lens. So, basically, saying anytime we notice any sense of like, "Oh, something feels off, something doesn't feel like... you know, something feels notably different between what's happening and the the utopia we can imagine," you know, something like that, is[sic] like encouraging ourselves to bring stuff like that in. And so we had a number of case studies where one or the other of us would bring in a sense of "Oh, like, I have a fear that if we go forward with this in this way, then you'll judge me in this way," or, "I'll be punished," or something like that. I'm trying to think of a really concrete case study. I mean, I guess [pause] one that I could particularly point out was when Georgia did something that landed to both of us as really weird. And we were trying to debrief it and... oh, hang on, I got a slightly more more precise one, just a sec... Oh, yeah. So there was a particular thing that goes back to school where I was kind of, you know, in an employer-ish role and George was kind of in an employee-ish role, even though we were holding a lot of fluidity about that. And there was a point when George noticed a sense of like, "Oh, I didn't do the thing I was going to do this week," or something like that, and there was a huge amount of fear that came up for him of like, telling me about that. And what we realized is basically that like that could trace back to a particular set of incidents in school where he felt like he had to lie about what he'd done in order to not get punished. It like wasn't okay to only have done what he did, he had to like, say, "Oh, I actually did more... you know, I read more of this book than I did" ot something like that. And so that was just a great example of like, George couldn't trust that I wouldn't punish [him, or] a part of him. [He] couldn't trust that I wouldn't punish him for not having done enough. But another part of him kind of knew that it[sic] was probably safe, right? And so this is that thing you were pointing at as like what I would call a bet and what you were calling like a leap, right? Like, you know, he made the leap to reveal to me anyway, "Hey, I didn't do this thing," and that was well received. But then there was a whole arc of processing the disturbance that it was for him to feel like he was going to be punished, and that part of him genuinely couldn't tell. Again, another part of him could tell, right? And this is part of really understanding that people are not monolithic creatures who think one thing about a particular topic - like, the different subsystems carry different knowings. And a lot of what I'm saying here, including referring to something like this as a knowing rather than something like a belief, [is] because on the inside you don't feel like you have beliefs, you just know things, right?

Yeah.

So, a lot of my understanding here, with all this stuff, comes from a framework called The Emotional Coherence Framework, which is based around the science of memory reconsolidation and how transformational therapy actually works, in terms of like helping people access the underlying generators of their behaviors. And so in this case we recognized that there was a kind of energy of how George was bringing something in that was related to this experience from high school. And we actually did some coherence transformational work on it, live on a work call, you know. And this is part of what I said would make a cool segue - it's like, part of what I'm so excited about is blending and merging the worlds of working on concrete projects together and doing therapeutic transformation. It's like there are certain psycho technologies that are very not safe to use in that kind of way. But if the basis that you're starting from is, "everybody honors their own feelings of distrust and unsafety," and we go from there, it's like there's kind of a basis for everybody to sort of [inaudible 55:39] and say, "Hey, this isn't working for me," and then there's a shared understanding of what that's gonna mean. It's [gonna mean] everybody's gonna say, "Okay, great! We've got to slow down." And the important thing I want to say here is people usually don't say it so clearly, they actually just start freaking out and you have to pause and say, "Hey, it seems like some part of you doesn't trust what's going on here, and I want to let you know that that distrust is totally welcome." Because the distrust gets so gaslit in the context of school and in other authoritarian contexts -that it's not enough to just not reject the distrust- you have to actively welcome it because it expects to be rejected, and it'll interpret almost anything as rejection. And of course, in some cases, it'll interpret the attempt at welcoming it as also rejection and you just keep trying, you know. And try creatively, don't just try the same thing. Or you don't keep trying if there's not the means to invest in that relationship, I guess, is what I'm saying. Oh man! This is all over the place, this is fun.

That last comment you made, I'm circling back to that one again. [The comment] of the tension that seems to exist inside of creating[sic] a non naive trust dance partnership with someone, to learn some new moves to get out, to stumble a bit, to make some mistakes, and to grow. That's a big commitment. You've got to commit to each other because that takes time, it takes care, it takes attention. And it's a bit of a roll of the dice, because until you've done that process with someone, you don't know whether they're going to be the right dance partner for you. So there's this kind of subtle process of being like, "I see you there, okay." Or if you're working with them, like, "Let's commit to doing this really wide form of relating, which is going to be a lot more time expensive, but will potentially be a lot more rewarding." But you can only do that with a select few people in your life at one time. And our modern workplaces and relationship structures seem to be filled with lots of different people. So,..., I guess my journey has been like, "Let's do this with 200 people in a collective." That's where I started, that's where I got excited and wrote the book and looked at Inspiral[58:05]*. And I know that you've got similar ideas with your Meta-organization. But then for me, I've been getting smaller and smaller; then it was like, "Alright, let's do a group of 14," then a group of five, and then I've just been working one on one with people. And it just seems to go deeper and deeper to the point where I'm like, "Oh, I think I need to just sit in the community of my own parts for the next six to seven months, and then build from there." And that's kind of in tandem with this meta crisis crunch we're facing and feeling like we need to go faster rather than slower. So, can you relate to that tension between slowing down and going deeper and other things wanting to speak?

Totally, the way that I like to put this -and I feel like somebody else has said this before but I haven't actually been able to find this quote, so I think you just attribute to me- is "It's too late not to go slow." We don't have time to rush.

Indeed.

And that really kind of highlights something about the paradox. It's like if you're trying to build full trust all the way down, we don't have time to paper over little moments of breaking, right? There might be times when it's not the time to go into it that minute, right? Like, you know, if you're just trying to like order a pizza and and you and your partner gets snappy at each other, then it's like, "Well, okay, we're gonna finish ordering the pizza, probably, and then we're going to debrief it later." And it's not that any given particular incident needs to be debriefed, the reality is life will continue presenting you with all of the problems you don't yet know how to solve, until you like learn how to solve them before you get them in the first place. So you don't need to go into any particular incident. But as Richard Schwartz of IFS talks about, all of these things are trailheads, basically. Like any moment of disconnect between you and another person is an opportunity to understand "How are we seeing the world differently? What kind of different expectations are we having of ourselves in each other that are generating that?"

Hmm. So, maybe the Non Naive Trust Dance is a bit more of a slow waltz rather than a foxtrot. Bit more of close-

I mean, that's the thing. It really is every kind of dance. And,..., I've been talking with a friend of mine, Eric, who lives lives out here in DC as well, a bunch about this. And he's got a bunch of experience doing West Coast Swing style dancing. So he's constantly pointing out parallels between the Non Naive Trust Dance and West Coast Swing, and we're drawing analogies, and we're talking about, "What does leading and following mean?" And that could be a total on other other podcast and so on. But, one of the things I said to him is, "West Coast Swing has a limit," which is you can't use West Coast Swing, as a dance to decide what kind of dance you're going to do, if you see what I mean. Like, you can use English to decide that, right? And you can use an implicit set of social norms, if you're at a fusion dance space, right? Like, you're going to kind of negotiate what kind of dance we're going to do based on how people are dressed and, you know, who's moving their hips in particular- there's all these subtle things, but you can't use the form to decide whether or not to use the form. Like you've got to somehow [add] something meta to that. And so what the Non Naive Trust dance is pointing at, and it is that meta thing, is the way that you that you can collectively make decisions about how to make decisions together. Like, even though you have a different basis that you're starting from, it's like, how do you sense into that together? Well, each person needs to tune into what kind of decision making process that they could trust or not trust, and you iterate towards that. And, you know, it's not just the utopia that's not done until everybody says it's done. It's like, the Non Naive Trust Dance as a framework isn't done until it can dance with everybody.

Yeah.

And I mean, literally everybody. Like I don't know it will get there in my lifetime, but I am really pointing at the difference between the Game A cultures where the basic assumption is that "cultures are always going to be in tension", to the Game B assumption where "cultures can coexist and coordinate and collaborate and find deeper wholes by connecting." And so it's like, say you've got a bunch of people who are like, "Yeah, we're doing Game B," but they can't collaborate with a bunch of other people - it's like, well, they're, they're not done yet. It's not done until it includes everybody. And that's such an absurdly huge challenge. But-

It's an intergenerational task, isn't it?

Yeah.

I wonder then, for you-

We're all doing our little pieces.

Indeed. What does this look like for you, practically, going forward right now? Are you in some sort of a constellation with a small group of people or a wider group of people?

Yeah,..., locally, I mean, given COVID, we haven't tried that much to connect with other Game B people in the space. But if you're listening to this, and you know, people in the coastal BC area, or Vancouver Island, who are into Game B, definitely, get in touch and so forth. Because we are looking to connect with people locally here. Mostly, we've been doing things online, and that's been... there's a lot of really beautiful stuff to that, because you can just, like... that's the whole thing. What do I really want to say here? What does this look like, for me? I've been working on doing projects with people - I mean, genuinely having some thing that you're trying to work on, whether that's, you know, like writing some code, or implementing a new software feature, or, you know, just my friend and I, this afternoon, we were reading a document together and commenting on it. And that was just such a way more satisfying experience than just reading it on our own, right? Because it's like something catches your attention, and immediately there's somebody else there to jam with about.

Do you have any of number of people that you ideally would like to be experimenting with in the first iteration of the metaorganization?

Yeah. I mean, for me, it's like... it's different numbers of people at different scales, basically. I feel drawn to a core group of five to seven, maybe eight, who are really consciously looking at this meta protocol thing, like really trying to figure that out. But also, it seems to me that each of those people would want to be working with other people on you know, small projects, or romantic relationships, or living together, or whatever, so that they can be practicing doing the Non Naive Trust Dance. Not just with other people who are saying "blah! blah! blah! non naive trust dance." Did I use the phrase "meta protocol" in there? I don't think I defined that. Meta protocol is Jordan halls term for essentially the same thing that the Non Naive Trust Dance is pointing at. So, it's also-

I'm referencing that as becoming community creatures - the shift from being social animals towards community creatures. So I'm enjoying... yeah, just how we're all languaging it in different ways but for working on the same project. It's beautiful, I think, in two or three years from now, to be able to compare notes. It's going to be really spectacular, but, yeah, go on.

Yeah,..., and at that time finding the similarities and differences, you know. What are you seeing that I'm not seeing? What am I seeing that Jordan Hall is not seeing? And all of the different possible connections there?

You guys are engineers as well, I can tell. The way you're structuring things is way more systems and processes.

Yeah, totally.

But it's different to how my brain works. So it'd be fun to also look at those different approaches,

Totally, and I think some of those differences will turn out to be aesthetic ones where there'll still be lots of possibility for collaboration. But people are... you know, there's going to be some people who want to live in really hot regions, some people want to live in cooler or temperate regions, or there's going to be some people who want to live super rural and other people who want to be totally urban. And so those basic differences are going to definitely inform, for instance, who lives together. Similarly, differences are going to inform who works on what projects together. But it's like, the thing we need to all be able to speak a common language about is, "How do we navigate those differences and find out which ones are not reconcilable, and which ones are reconcilable? And which ones are reconcilable pragmatically with the resources that we have, and which ones are sort of like, well, if you and I both did a bunch of trauma healing for a year about the ways in which we each respectively remind each other of past abusers, then we could talk, but in the meantime, this is just, you know, not worth trying to pursue?", and [inaudible 1:07:06] just kind of find those spaces.

Yeah. And that's why numbers for me is such an interesting question, because as soon as it gets to scale - I mean, obviously, you have all these advantages of economies of scale and network effects. But, I mean, you look at the big Facebook groups, even the Game B Facebook groups, there's a lot of conflict going on in there. And-

Oh, totally. I mean, and that's because you don't have the the shared sense - I mean, Game B in principle would be a shared sense of "How do we talk?"

Yeah,

But in practice, what it is, is a "How do we wish we knew how to talk but don't yet?

Yeah, it's tricky. And I think it's worth that we're all focusing on it as a first step.

Yeah. One of my favorite phrases in relation to all this stuff is like, "What do we do in the meantime?"

Hmm, I like that.

And it's really important to not reify that, because reifying it as like, "Oh, well, before we have Game B, we'll have Proto Bs, or we'll have Transition Bs. And it's like, "Well, no, they're still recommended by someone even [inaudible 1:08:08]. Anyway, the important part isn't actually answering the question, "What do we do in the meantime?" with some definitive answer. It's more like, you know, say you've got some conflict resolution process that you think would help a given community or context, but you can't get everybody to agree on using that context, or using that conflict resolution process. Well, what do you do in the meantime? And there's no single answer to that. But the important thing to recognize is that there continues to be a meantime, and you need to continue to figure out what to do in it.

Yeah. Well, the new Playstation 5 has just come out. So that could be the interim toy. As you bring this up, I recognize two things. I recognize an excitement around the meta-tribe. I love this idea of the few thousand people plus that are on this wavelength starting to find each other through the internet and dialogue, and get to the point where with decentralized technology, crypto wealth, [and] just the freedom of digital nomadism, that we can actually aggregate in the next few decades and create this, or sooner, because we're going to need to get a move on. Yeah, so that excites me. What scares me is, well, I've become a little bit snooty - a little bit like, you know, one part of me is like a Labrador that just wants to run lick everyone's faces and be licked in return. And then the other part of me is like, I'm not a joiner anymore. After my experiences. I've been like in my naive period of that and now I'm in a period of, "This needs to be done in a very certain way or else I'm not gonna play," and I'm okay with that. But there's just a tension in that, and I think more people are getting there.

[Laughter] Totally, totally. I said something similar to my friend, Allie Terterin* [1:10:04]; we said 'hi' to her on a social distance walk on our drive across Canada - she's in Winnipeg. And she was saying something like, "I don't know if you'll find a community to join out there, but there's lots of people you can connect with and stuff like that". And I was saying, you know, "Honestly, I think, speaking for myself, I've seen too much to join anything at this point." And I think it's exactly the thing that you were just saying; it's like, there's this feeling of, like, I couldn't just step into a thing, because it would just be so vivid to me, the things that would never missing from my perspective.

Yeah.

And in the meantime, am I going to hold out until I have the means to make a whole thing all from scratch myself? Or is it actually maybe more possible to spend some time in such community and see what I can do with my capacity for dialogue in that context? You know? While recognizing that it is really hard to change the roots of something? Like, the basic premise or purpose from which something arose, it's almost impossible for that sort of thing to change within an organization.

Yeah.

It will even sometimes appear to change, but the appearing to change is still like part of the original intention. In some sense it's still serving that as opposed to the the new thing. So being with both of those... yeah, I totally resonate with that. And I'm going to just try saying something edgy, because, you know, that's what we're doing, and what would be the fun if we didn't? I don't know if I have super clear examples, but it's like to even just point at the texture of the thing you're talking about- you know, there's been various moments in this call where I've heard you say stuff, and I'm kind of like, "Oh, he doesn't get it." And the same might be true in reverse, right? Like, there's not a, "I know more than you," it's a "I know different than you," right? But it's like, because I'm not aware of the things I don't know, it can end up feeling like, "Well, here's the set of things I know, and then here's the subset of those things that you know," and so it feels like I know more, because I'm not able to see this set of things you know, that I don't know. And so, yeah! I mean, this is like, you know, one of the things that I think is really beautiful, when all this stuff clicks into places there starts to be more sense of like, "Oh, anyone can be my teacher, because everybody is holding these sets of experiences that I haven't had. And they're going to, you know, whether they intend to or not, they're going to tend to critique everything I'm doing with even just how they listen to me. And, you know, how they take in what I'm saying, or how they vibe with it, or don't or anything like that." So, yeah, it feels edgy to say that I've had the thought in this call, like, "Oh, you don't get it." [Chuckles]

Uh huh. Yeah, that's pretty edgy, but good. I welcome it. It makes me think that to be aware and cautious of the hubris of not being a joiner, because what I feel is like-

totally

You know what I mean? Like, of course, there's gonna be things that you have and know that I don't, and vice versa, and you risk losing that. And, I mean, ironically, these projects that I'm leaning towards -it sounds like we both are- they are all about that mind meld. And you really do need to be open and connect those different experiences and skills. So it doesn't work unless you come in with that level of openness, which is like a delicious idea. Because it's kind of like you need to get over that hurdle. You need to integrate that before you can get what you're after. So if you're open to lean into the edge a bit more, I'm curious to know, any particular references or if you want to unpack any of it? Or not, that's fine.

I love the idea of it. I'm not sure if I remember the specifics. [Pause]. Let's see, I'm just kind of scanning back over the different stuff that we've talked about.

If you can't remember in the context of this call, what I'd be curious to know is what are the general feelings? The general like, "Oh, this person." Not with me; [it] could be with me or with anyone like, I could give you examples as well. They're not emotionally open enough, maybe they're a little bit too judgmental or whatever.

Yeah, this is - all these different kinds of things. Yeah. [Pause] I mean, sometimes people think that... oh, here's a different... I thought of a very specific critique I've had of Richard Bartlett that made me think "Oh, he doesn't get it". And I was just like, "Oh, like, would it be weird to just like..." and then this is part of the whole, like, "What's the story of what we're doing?" Right? Like, you know, Is this me bashing on him? Or is this the process of exploring different meanings and understandings?

I'm pretty good friends of rich. And my understanding of him is that if it's shared with love and care that he would be open for us to explore that kind of thing. But obviously, check in with your heart and soul. I'm gonna have him on the podcast in the next few weeks. So we can also unpack Malcolm if you want, in return. Before you go there, this is it, this is what I want to be doing. I want to be in communication with each other. What is it? Help me see. Like, I want to know what I'm not getting, because there could be a gem in there. There could be something that would [inaudible 1:16:13].

Yeah. I mean, I do. I do think this one is a gem. And I've been meaning to write it up. And I actually, somewhat intentionally because I was about to have this call with Richard Bartlett. I was like, "Oh, let me meet him face to face first, before I write up this particular critique of the thing that he said." And the thing is around power, and I'll do a whole proper debrief or deconstruction of this framework later. But have you heard people use the distinction of like "power over," "power with," "power to"? Something like that? So Richard has referenced this a couple times, and the the one in particular that made me go "Wait, what?" was I think him on him being interviewed, or something, by the by Mike and Euvie. I forget if it was future thinkers, though, or if it was more like one of those summits or something anyway. So there's this thing of these different kinds of power, and people sometimes conflate "power over" with explicit hierarchical power. And this is a deep, deep, deep confusion and one that I and many other people have been burned by. And, and so there's something really subtle where.... so people will kind of distinguish "power over" as being coercive, or like hierarchical, authoritative power, and "power with" as being more kind of like social power.

Yeah.

And so they'll say, "Well, yeah, I have a kind of power in this group that you don't have, but that doesn't mean its 'power over'." The way that I would put it is that these are actually two different layers or different dimensions. There's social power, and there's formal power, and there's physical power, right? Like, "who would win in a fight?" is, sometimes, relevant, but is probably not relevant to your and my conversation right now. Because we're a continent away, right? So, any of these can have a power imbalance, right? Like, you might have one person who could win in a fight against somebody else, but the person who's physically weaker is way higher status in that group. And if somebody were to attack them, it's like, that person would immediately lose a much larger contest?

Yeah.

And, you know, to take a really very, very basic example-

An important one for me, though, because I'm a relatively small guy, and I thank my lucky stars that I don't live in a brute force society.

Right? Yeah. And so this is an example of two different power imbalances that are present at the same time. And, for me, the way that I would try to, instead, recharacterize "power over", "power to", and "power with" is something like, "power to" is just the ability to do something like independent of whatever anybody else is doing. Like you know, can I play a song on my guitar? Like yes, I have the power to do that. "Power with" is like something I can do with other people but not alone. You know, so can I play a whole song as a band? Well, obviously me on my own can't do that - at least not without a loop machine. But you know, I can do that with other people. "Power over" is any time my preference gets to trump yours, wherever the source of that power is. And so that could be social power. It could be, I get to call you a shitty name or like some subtle thing in a social group. And you kinda know that if you call me on it, everybody's gonna side with me instead of you. Or it might not even be something so overtly shitty. It might just literally be, like, I'm setting the agenda, right? And you don't get as much say. And nowhere is that explicated, it's just like, in principle, people do what this person says, not what that person says. And so, even with these really subtle social kinds of power -and I guess you could maybe point at some kind of intellectual power at various other like dimensions of power- but even within those really subtle layers, there can still be absolutely "power over" and what those "power over" dynamics do, is they mean that certain people's needs go chronically unmet. And there tends to be a thing, and I really don't like the word gaslighting because it itself itself is so easy to weaponize, but if you'll allow me for a moment to just point at gaslighting as a structural phenomenon, which is not blaming any particular agent as doing the gaslighting, but just the phenomenon of people having their own sense of what they know and what they feel and what they need, made not acceptable? Like not just "not acceptable to express," but "not even acceptable to even fully acknowledged to themselves?" This happens a ton in groups, many people have observed that if you're hanging out with certain people, certain thoughts are really hard to have. And it's like what's going on there? Well, there's a kind of social power that person is exerting over the group that is not due to any particular official status necessarily, and is not due to any particular physical status necessarily, but it's just a result of their social power and perhaps their power to express their own frame of reality in ways that are hard to contest. So anyway, when I hear people conflating "power with," with "social power," I'm like, "No, no, no, these are very different things." And that's the thing that causes me to go, "Oh, this person doesn't get this thing.' But then again, this is a really subtle thing, you know? Most people don't get this, and that's why I need to write a blog post about it.

Joe Lightfoot 1:19:00

Mm hmm. Yeah, I feel you

But that was the thing that I saw Richard being, from my perspective, confused about.

Yeah, definitely, power. It's right at the heart of what we're talking about alongside trust in these new contexts. I mean, it's, it's what we're trying to play with.

Exactly, and so it's like power and trust, and all these things, need to kind of go up a level of abstraction and really be able to be deconstructed and reconstructed and worked with consciously rather than having to be in the background. And so that's, I guess, the the thrust of the work that I'm doing.

Yeah.

And mostly just in the form of having conversations with people, writing up my thoughts, and trying to organize the different things I'm seeing other people think about it.

Beautiful, I love it. I love the way your mind works, Malcolm. From what I've experienced so far, this synthesis going on, I get the feeling that there's so much happening in there that we've barely touched on. And it's marvelous. Thanks for opening up and sharing some of your newest fear with me today. And I'm looking forward to reading more about these ideas in written form. Appreciate your thinking and draft courage here to really kind of dance around what are just emerging ideas for you.

Totally, yeah. And I've been trying to do more of that with writing as well. You know, so I have my, I have my blog, where I post things that are at least somewhat finished of some form. And then I have my my Roam blog, which is just like a public roam graph where I'm just typing stuff and not worrying about trying to finish it, but just interlinking all of it. And so I've been very much leaning towards creating more surface area for other people to connect with me in the world. Yeah.

Yeah. What's the best way for people to find your work and connect with you?

Yeah, I mean, the most sort of direct way is to hit me up on Twitter at malcolm_ocean. And then there's links there to malcomocean.com, which is my blog. There's not an obvious link to my Roam blog, except, you can find it at intertwingled.blog, and if you got shownotes we can throw all this stuff in there.

Yeah, well, thanks Malcolm. Really appreciate your time today and look forward to continuing the dance together in the future.

Yeah, sounds good

I hope you enjoyed the podcast as much as I did. Show notes are available online at www.joelightfoot.org, where you can also find more information about my book "A Collective Blooming." Music by Johnny Eagle. Until next time, be well my friends